We often call Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) a ‘Masonic opera’ – but ‘magic opera’ is just as appropriate. Mozart’s librettist Emanuel Schikaneder took much of his inspiration and several characters from Christoph Martin Wieland’s fairytale collection Dschinnistan. It wasn’t the first time Schikaneder had worked on a fairytale opera, and the sub-genre of opéra féerie had been thriving in France since 1771. But Die Zauberflöte is arguably the first masterpiece of the genre – and it heralded a growing interest in fairytales and magic as operatic subjects.

Fairytale opera also thrived in Central Europe. Dvořák’s Rusalka is a particularly tragic take on the genre, its beautiful melancholic music reflecting the water nymph Rusalka’s desperate attempts to win a soul and her beloved prince. But Dvořák also brought robust comedy to fairytale opera in The Devil and Kate, about a bossy girl who outwits a clueless devil. Bartók provided a dark, psychological interpretation of ‘Bluebeard’ with Bluebeard’s Castle. On the other hand, examples of Italian fairytale opera are rare – the few exceptions include Rossini’s La Cenerentola, which focuses more on morals than magic, and Puccini’s Turandot, loosely based on a Persian fairytale.

Die Zauberflöte’s most direct descendent is Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, which Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal regarded as their version of Mozart and Schikaneder’s masterpiece. The works have many parallels, including the fantastical Eastern setting, the trials endured by two couples (one noble, one humble) and the radiant finales praising the power of love. Above all, both achieve the full potential of fairytale opera: to use a magical setting to tell a moving, profound and very human story.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, we've published a post a week offering a closer look at the composer and his work.

Our A-Z of Richard Strauss has examined - among other subjects - the debate over his Nazi sympathies, why he relished writing for sopranos but was less than generous to tenors, and the sneaky inclusion of yodelling in his operas. It was written by author and musicologist Gavin Plumley, formerly the blogger behind Entartete Musik.

Everything that goes on in this building is connected to music. Whether we are sewing costumes, designing posters or sweeping the stage, everything that we do is channelled towards presenting great performances of opera and ballet; and both of these art forms would be nothing without notes on a sheet of paper (or screen).

The Music Library is a vital part of the Royal Opera House, working across all music for our productions. Library staff prepare and maintain all the scores required by conductors, singers, stage managers, staff directors, Learning and Participation, Jette Parker Young Artists, Development and technical departments and The Royal Ballet (both at home and on tour). They also order or create new instrumental parts for the orchestral musicians, mark up all musical directions and provide a wealth of knowledge on everything musical.

Robin Gordon-Powell has worked in the Music Library for almost thirteen years, freelancing for most of that time, but providing maternity cover for the past year. As the hands marking up a score in one of our Season Appeal images, we interviewed him about the Season ahead.

Robin, what are you most looking forward to in the 2014/15 Season?
Definitely Król Roger. It’s never been done here before and it’s a lovely, mystical work. Karol Szymanowski is an amazing composer and it’s a brand new production so will be really interesting to see. It’s being sung in Polish and my colleague Julie Davies is currently marking up the English translation into the full score for Tony Pappano who is conducting.

I’m also looking forward to I due Foscari, which was last seen here in 1995. It’s another new co-production (with Los Angeles Opera, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia, and Theater an der Wien) with Plácido Domingo singing the role of Francesco Foscari. Early Verdi: you could scarcely get further away from the sensitive exoticism of Szymanowski! I’m currently marking up the parts and Tony Pappano’s score so that things like dynamics, accents and phrasing all correspond – it’s vital that they have the same markings, so that time is not taken up needed in rehearsals to sort out the basic points of the music.

What’s been a memorable production for you in 2013/14?
I loved all of the Strauss operas, but Die Frau ohne Schatten was especially memorable, as I’d never seen it before. I spent ages working on the horn parts – four of the eight horn players alternate between French Horns and Tenor Tubas – and I had to make up new, legible, transposed parts for them. I was very involved with the music, which was glorious, and sat in on several of the purely orchestral rehearsals. As a conductor myself (in my ‘spare’ time), it was tremendous to watch, and work closely with Semyon Bychkov, who is a very intelligent and articulate conductor, and to see how he rehearsed.

What’s next for you at the Royal Opera House?
My maternity cover position is soon coming to an end, so I’ll be working fewer days a week on a project to create a new database of everything we have in the Library and our archives, which are scattered around the building, as well as off-site. Our current paper catalogue only reflects a proportion of our stock and has grown up on a somewhat ad-hoc basis; it’s not really working as well as it should. I’m looking forward to starting work on that, on newly developed software which I shall have to learn — although I shall probably be working on my own in a different office, and will miss the company (and occasional singing) of my colleagues in the Library. In my life outside of the Royal Opera House I edit and publish music of – mainly – Sir Arthur Sullivan, alongside conducting when I can.

No one could write for the soprano voice like Richard Strauss. From the songs he wrote for his wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna, through to the exquisite Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs), Strauss's soprano music is technically challenging for the singer but offers endless delights for the listener. Here's a guide to some of our favourite soprano roles from his operas.

Elektra is one of the most challenging parts ever written for dramatic soprano. The role requires a huge vocal range, with eight high B flats and four high Cs and also some very low-lying passages. The singer needs to be able to project above a vast orchestra: her great monologue in Scene 2 (‘Allein! Weh, ganz allein!’), her dialogue with Klytämnestra and the final scene of the opera require great power. But she also needs tenderness, in the moving recognition scene 'Orest! Orest!' in which Elektra is reunited with her brother.

The other principal female roles in the opera – Elektra’s gentler sister Chrysothemis and her murderous mother Klytämnestra – are equally challenging and rewarding.

Strauss realized he’d pushed the female voice to its dramatic limits in Elektra. In his next opera, Der Rosenkavalier, he explored the voice’s lyric potential. His heroine, the Marschallin, is one of the most complex women in opera - humorous, sensual and lively but also pensive and sensitive. Strauss wrote some wonderful music for her, including the great monologue and duet in Act I, ‘Da geht er hin’/‘Ah, du bist wieder da!’ in which the Marschallin remembers her youth, and faces up to the prospect of ageing.

Der Rosenkavalier also features two other great female roles. The innocent Sophie von Faninal is the perfect part for a young soprano with a soaring lyric voice, and the passionate Octavian is a wonderful role for high mezzo-soprano. In the final act, Strauss brings the three singers together in the most exquisite trio for female voices in opera, ‘Hab mir’s gelobt’.

Strauss’s two soprano roles in Ariadne auf Naxos are vocal and dramatic opposites. The cheerful and extrovert coquette Zerbinetta is a showstopping part for coloratura soprano, with a fiercely difficult showcase aria, ‘Grossmächtige Prinzessin!’ By contrast, Ariadne is a full lyric soprano, like the Marschallin but even more dignified. Strauss wrote Ariadne two beautiful arias expressing her longing for Theseus (‘Ein Schönes war’) and her craving for death (‘Es gibt ein Reich’). He also wrote one of his very few great duets for soprano and tenor for when Ariadne is united with the god Bacchus (‘Gibt es kein Hinüber’). Strauss had been tasked by his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal to write music that depicted Ariadne mysteriously transformed through love.

In the 1919 version of the opera (the one usually performed today) Strauss included a third great female role in the Prologue: the fiery Composer (who, like Octavian, can be sung by mezzo-soprano or soprano) has some thrilling music, particularly the aria ‘Sein wir wieder gut’, in praise of ‘holy art’.

The role of the Empress in Strauss’s epic ‘fairytale opera’ was written for Maria Jeritza, the first Ariadne. The parts have much of the same melodic beauty, but the Empress poses a greater challenge. The singer is on stage for nearly the whole opera (over three hours) and has to sing several large-scale arias (the first, ‘Ist mein Liebster dahin?’ containing coloratura and an optional high D) – and reserve enough stamina for an intense solo scene in Act III.

Strauss modelled elements of the role of Barak's Wife on his wife Pauline. The part contains intense drama, particularly in the Wife’s arguments with her husband Barak. However, Strauss’s first Wife was Lotte Lehmann, a singer renowned for vocal beauty as well as dramatic acting, and Barak's Wife must sound warm and tender in Act III, particularly in her duet with Barak ‘Mir anvertraut’. In Hofmannsthal's words, Barak's Wife is ‘a bizarre woman with a very beautiful soul’.

Countess Madeleine is an elegant, poised but playful aristocrat, similar to the Marschallin. We rarely see her lose her composure. She manages to keep the peace between her two lovers, the poet Olivier and the composer Flamand. She is affectionately teasing towards the grandiose theatre director La Roche and her stagestruck brother, and appropriately respectful to the great actress Clairon. But in her great solo scene ‘Morgen mittags um elf!’, which closes the opera, Strauss gives us an insight into her true feelings. This beautiful ten-minute scene depicts the Countess musing on the beauty of words and music combined in opera, and trying in vain to choose which of two suitors she will accept. Full of glorious melody, it is a moving swansong from Strauss to the operatic stage – and, most of all, the soprano voice he loved so much.

Ariadne auf Naxos runs 25 June–13 July 2014. Tickets are still available.
The production is given with generous philanthropic support from Hélène and Jean Peters, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth and The Maestro’s Circle.

Writing to Strauss about Elektrain 1908, Hofmannsthal commented that ‘you may wish me to transpose the whole thing into a simpler and more lyrical key, while preserving the scenario entire, an operation such as Da Ponte carried out on the text of the comedy Le Mariage de Figaro’. Strauss later praised Hofmannsthal as being like Da Ponte and Eugène Scribe, the librettist of Robert le diableand Les Vêpres siciliennes, ‘rolled into one’. But perhaps the strongest parallel with the world of the late 18th-century Vienna and Mozart’s collaboration with Da Ponte and came from Hofmannsthal in 1911, when he suggested that Die Frau ohne Schatten would ‘stand in the same relation to Die Zauberflöte as Rosenkavalier does to Figaro’.

Their partnership spanned from Elektra (1909) to Arabella (1933). Hofmannsthal first approached Strauss in 1900 with a scenario for a ballet called Der Triumph der Zeit, but it was Strauss who instigated their working relationship proper when he asked Hofmannsthal if he could adapt the writer’s 1903 version of Sophocles’s tragedy Electrafor the operatic stage.

Before he met Strauss, Hofmannsthal was a major figure within Jung Wien, the group of intellectual radicals who dominated the culture of turn of the century Vienna. On the face of it, a partnership seemed unlikely - Hofmannsthal was scholarly and cerebral, while Strauss was theatrical and practically minded. It proved a winning combination and together the pair wrote Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena and Arabella, as well as Hofmannsthal providing the scenario for the 1914 ballet Josephslegende and the opera Die Liebe der Danae.

As you might expect from two contrasting personalities, their relationship was frequently marked by disagreement, as detailed in their extensive correspondence. The partnership had a particularly tragic end, when Hofmannsthal died of a stroke in July 1929, two days after his son Franz had committed suicide. A telegram had arrived from Strauss in the 48-hour period between the two deaths, congratulating Hofmannsthal on his superb work on Arabella. But he neither read the missive nor saw the result of that hard work and Strauss, learning of his friend’s death, was plunged into a deep depression, which prevented him from attending the funeral. ‘No musician ever found such a helper and supporter’, Strauss wrote. ‘No one will ever replace him for me or the world of music!’.

2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss’s birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (until 2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.

All broadcasts will be available afterwards on BBC iPlayer for seven days. In addition to full performances, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a number of interviews and features through the rest of the 2013/14 Season. For details of these, follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

The opera tells the story of an Empress, a supernatural being who does not cast a shadow. When told that if she does not acquire a shadow in three days she will be returned to the spirit world and her husband the Emperor turned to stone, she embarks on a quest to find a shadow.

Die Frau ohne Schatten runs until 2 April. Tickets are still available.
The production is staged with generous philanthropic support from Sir Simon and Lady Robertson, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth, The Friends of Covent Garden and an anonymous donor.

Our 'How to Stage an Opera' series offers different perspectives on the practicalities of staging an opera, from the initial research through to the final performance. In this the first in the series we look at the historical context of Strauss's opera and trace some of the thought processes that influenced the director and the designer's approach.

Die Frau ohne Schatten was written over the course of World War I and was first performed in Vienna in 1919. It is a child of its time. The theories of Freud and Jung on the action of the subconscious and the meanings of dreams had fundamentally altered the way people understood ideas of identity and motivation. A new mode of interpretation, of both fictional stories and actual events, had been created and was applied with abandon. Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto for Die Frau ohne Schatten is rife with fantastical figures that carry heavy symbolism, and a clear product Hofmannstahl's fascination with Freud's theories.

There are two challenges that face modern directors who wish to stage Die Frau ohne Schatten. The first is a recurrent issue in opera, of how to represent the extraordinary stage directions set down in the libretto. The second is more subtle and more challenging. The usefulness of Freud and Jung's theories has been sharply questioned in the years that separate us and the premiere of Die Frau, to the extent that Freudian interpretations can now seem almost laughably crude. And advances in gender equality have meant that many of the assumptions that underpin the symbolism of Hofmannsthal's libretto – that all women must want children, for example – seem at best old-fashioned and at worst offensive. The consequence is that the story of Die Frau ohne Schatten can seem little more than an alien artefact from a bygone era. The challenge for directors is to make a production that is true to the work and that speaks to the audience.

For The Royal Opera's new production, director Claus Guth and dramaturg Ronny Dietrich directly reference the influence of Freud on Hofmannsthal's libretto. They tell the story as a dream in the mind of a woman, where the weird symmetries, the oneiric leaps in time and space, the grotesque caricatures assume nightmarish significance. But in the space around her dreams Guth and Dietrich tell a further story. The dreaming woman is undergoing psychotherapy. She is surrounded – both in reality and in her nightmares – by authoritarian male figures. Questions are immediately raised. What is she being treated for? Is she held against her will? Can there ever be a cure? Through this device the creative team are able to represent literally the fantastical effects called for in Hofmannsthal's libretto while at the same time questioning the moral assumptions of the early 20th century that lie behind it.

In every opera the set design is crucial to the director's approach. It is the most visually obvious thing on stage and must fulfill vital practical requirements. Christian Schmidt's set design for Guth's Die Frau ohne Schatten is a masterpiece of efficiency in both respects. The curtain rises on a curved wall that entirely fills the stage, at once imposing and expansive. The dark wood colouring immediately suggests a clinic from the mid-20th century, while the smooth, endless wall seems to imprison the characters within it. A rotating middle panel acts as a door into the subconscious, creating the various worlds visited in the opera while leaving us firmly planted in the Empress's horrible reality – we, like her, are trapped. The large wall is a gift for the powerful singers demanded by the score, adding natural amplification that allows them to be clearly heard even when facing away from the audience. And the quiet, seamless set changes present no distraction from Strauss's thrilling orchestral interludes.

Guth's production of Die Frau ohne Schatten is an example of an interpretive approach to an opera that has always been a challenge to stage. Follow the next in our series to explore how directors have approached more familiar repertory – La traviata, and the period designs of Richard Eyre's production.

Die Frau ohne Schatten runs until 2 April 2014. Tickets are still available.
The production is a co-production with La Scala, Milan and is given with generous philanthropic support from Sir Simon and Lady Robertson, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth, The Friends of Covent Garden and an anonymous donor.

We are delighted to publish a poem by the late Peter Porter, which was sent to us by his widow Christine.

Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House, who was a personal friend of Porter says of the poem, ‘It is elegant testimony both to his deep passion for and understanding of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. I just wish he could still be here to hear Bychkov and see Guth's take on this most extraordinary and extravagant piece.’

But that one who is the every always one
May still be a surprise – if she’s whom
That time betrayed and this time rebuked,
Who, while you were thinking of another
Startled you by not wanting to be with you
Though you’d excused all othernesses
By resolving to make her the true centre
Of existence; accepting that this was
Accounting, a way of excusing betrayal
By ordering responsibility –
Then, and no surprise after all
It should be so, the uncontrollable dream
Showed not her but you; not life but death.

This might be the message of the bridge the dead
Walk over: they are sparkling in their chances
However undeserving; they have been dressed
In time’s immeasurability;
One life could never be enough; their tunes
Are faces, their words perfectly understandable
Yet have no meaning. This side of the bridge
There is a toll – it’s like the seventy stairs
You have been up and down a million times;
It is paid in lifetime familiarity.
Now they are seen to be carrying, everyone
The same burden, the command to love,
Where some object might exist as proof
Or all the stars collate the obligation.

Die Frau ohne Schatten is at the Royal Opera House until 2 April.
Peter Porter’s poem ‘The Chorale at the Crossing’ will appear in a volume to be published by Picador next year.